Students are threatening to sue the University of North Carolina over its Confederate statue

Demonstrators
rally for the removal of a Confederate statue, Silent Sam, on the
campus of the University of Chapel Hill on August 22, 2017 in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina.Sara D.
Davis

A student law group at the University of North Carolina is
threatening to sue school officials if they don't take down a
controversial Confederate statue.

The statue, known as Silent Sam, stands prominently on the
campus's main quad, where students have hosted near-daily
protests and occasionally clashed with counter-protesters and law
enforcement.

Writing on behalf of the Black Law Student Association and other
students, attorney Hampton Dellinger argued in a letter sent
Wednesday to university chancellor Carol Folt and UNC
system president Margaret Spellings that allowing the
statue to remain standing violates the Civil Rights Act
of 1964.

"Silent Sam should go for many reasons including its
incompatibility with the 'inclusive and welcoming environment'
promised by UNC’s non-discrimination policy,” Dellinger wrote.
"We are providing legal notice of an additional
reason why Silent Sam must come down now: the statue violates
federal anti-discrimination laws by fostering a racially hostile
learning environment."

Dellinger said the students plan to file complaints with
the Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the
Department of Justice, according to Raleigh's
News and Observer.

The Silent Sam statue was erected in 1913 as a monument to UNC
students who joined the Confederate army in the Civil War. At its
dedication ceremony, former Confederate private Julian Carr
said
of the soldiers, "their courage and steadfastness
saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South."

The statue has been the source of controversy on UNC's
campus for decades, but came under renewed scrutiny
following the violent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, last
month, when white-supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups descended on
the town to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
They were met by counter-protesters, and the ensuing clashes left
one counter-protester and two police officers dead.

"It is no wonder that Silent Sam remains a rallying cry,
and a gathering place, for white supremacists today," Dellinger
wrote in his letter. "More than a century later, Silent Sam still
speaks loudly."

A political firestorm

The
Silent Sam statue has remained under police protection for
weeks.Gerry
Broome

UNC's Folt and the university's Board of Governors have come
under fire for their handling of the Silent Sam issue.

Last month, Folt received written permission from North Carolina
Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to take down the statue if they felt
it presented "a real risk to public safety." He cited a
state law passed in 2015 that made it more difficult to
remove Confederate monuments, but also included an exception when
a monument "poses a threat to public safety because of an
unsafe or dangerous condition."

However, despite the apparent go-ahead, the university
challenged Cooper's interpretation of the statute the next
day, arguing that the "dangerous condition" exception refers
only to a monument's physical disrepair.

"We continue to believe that removing the Confederate
Monument is in the best interest of the safety of our campus, but
the University can act only in accordance with the laws of the
state of North Carolina," the university
said in a statement.

Critics accused Folt of bowing to pressure from the university's
overwhelmingly Republican board of governors, a 28-member panel
that makes policy decisions for the UNC system. Others
accused the board members of being "too beholden to the
legislators that appointed them," as
the News and Observer put it.

"She understands that her salary is at risk if she takes
a strong stance against white supremacy and hatred," senior
Michelle Brown, who helped organize a series of sit-ins to
protest the statue, told Business Insider.

"We did see it as a time for them to be on the right side of
history, to make the morally correct decision to take it
down, but that wasn't the case."